Contracting & Delivering: Enterprise Scale Agile Projects

Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at 11:00 am EDT

While companies are moving from ‘waterfall’ to ‘agile’, the knowledge and education received by large companies on the approach tends to come from their service providers. But these projects tend to favor the service providers because they entail keeping the agreements open-ended with time and materials constructs, instead of allowing for a fixed price. This means that a company really doesn’t know when the agile project is going to end, and they often forfeit large-deal price leverage.

Implementing agile at global scale introduces new challenges – team sizes are often in the hundreds, implementations are global, compliance is life critical, and the domain is very complex. The larger the project, the greater the risk and need for oversight and constant involvement. When the project is so long, its benefits are often not realized quickly.